Mechanical Revolutions

Sources

More and Better. As the population of the United States grew, newspaper circulation skyrocketed in the 1880s and 1890s, and technological innovations kept pace. Improved printing methods made possible an increase in newspaper and magazine distribution without increasing costs. The availability of these new processes allowed publishers to promote their papers with the knoledge that their presses could keep up with demand. Advertisers also bought more space, knowing that many readers would see their skillfully printed advertisements. Finally, a fall in the price of newsprint helped large-scale printing to remain cheap.

The Greatest Innovation. In the history of printing no innovation rivals the 1884 introduction of the Lino type machine. Fore more than four hundred years typesetting had remained the same—full pages of type had to be set manually, letter by letter, with individual precast type pieces. The Linotype allowed typesetters to create mechanically one line of type at a time.

Inventor. Ottmar Megenthaler (1854-1899), a German living in the United States, patented his invention in 1855 after spending a year improving the original version. With a Linotype the typesetter used a device similar to a typewriter with ninety keys. By pushing a key a letter of punctuation mark (called matrices) could be put into place. After a line was finished a quick-cooling molten alloy was poured over the casts; once cooled it formed a complete line of type (called a slug). The Linotype also automatically justified text by inserting spaces between words and making each line the same width.

Change. The Linotype was an immediate success and revolutionized the printing industry. It allowed typesetters to set more than five thousand pieces of type per hour as opposed to fifteen hundred by hand. The machine required only one operator and allowed daily news papers to shorten the time between receiving a story and getting it to the street. The New York Times became the first publication to use it in 1886, and by 1899 three thousand were in use worldwide. Magazines and books were typeset on the Linotype machine. It was supplanted only in the late twentieth century by electronic composition.

Speed and Color. By 1890 most papers began printing with stereotype plates, which not only sped up the printing process but allowed the breaking of columns for illustrations, headlines, and advertisements. Unlike a type-revolving press, the Hoe press could print forty-eight thousand twelve-page papers in ah hour, allowing publishers to keep up with circulations of approximately half a million. New color presses, used to print the Sunday supplements, also came into use in the early 1890s. In 1893 the New York World became one of the first newspapers to use a color press.

THE TYPEWRITER

The first known writing machine dates to England in 1714. William Austin Burt received the first American patent for a “typographer” in 1829. Over the next forty years some twenty different typewriting inventions appeared in the United States as well as Britain and France, but the first practical manual typewriter did not appear until 1868, when Christopher Latham Sholes, a former editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel, Patented his invention. He sold his plan to arms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons in 1873. Three years later Remington introduced its Model I to the public at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. In 1878 it was upgraded to print both upper- and lower- case letters. This early Remington version sat on a sewing-machine stand and had a carriage return operated by a treadle. The first market for the machine was among writers, editors, and clergymen. Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is supposedly the first book to have been printed from a typewritten draft.

While the machine’s utility was obvious, many people had doubts that the business world would ever adopt such as impersonal mode of communication. The Associated Press adopted the typewriter in 1885, but many of its journalists still wrote their copy in longhand. Sears, Roebuck and Company continued to sent handwritten letters to its rural customers well into the twentieth century. Moreover the typewriter cost as much as $125, a price few consumers could afford. By 1878 Remington had sold a total of only four thousand machines. New innovations made the typewriter cheaper as well as more reliable and efficient, and within ten years sales increased to fifteen hundred per month. In 1893 the type basket was placed in front of the platen, or roller, and in 1896 the automatic ribbon-reverse appeared. The typewriter brought women into the commercial workplace in greater numbers because its operation was considered a respectable occupation. By the end of the century the typewriter could be found in the majority of offices.

Sources: Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973);

Richard N. Current, The Typewriter and the Men Who Made It (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954).

The Halftone. In the 1880s most American newspapers illustrated their stories with engravings printed from zinc plates or woodblocks. The demand for artists was short-lived, however, because Frederick E. Ives was at work developing a process to prepare photographs for printing. Ives, who had been made the head of the photographic laboratory at Cornell University in 1876, when he was twenty, had his first success with a halftone in 1878. By 1886 he had perfected a commercial process. A photoengraving, or halftone, was made from an image photographed through a screen and then etched so that the details of the image were reproduced in dots. If the dots were close together, the image would be dark; the farther apart they were, the lighter the image would become. In 1897 Stephen H. Horgan of the New York Tribune, who had actually printed the first quality halftone,

“Shantytown,” in the New York Daily Graphic in 1880, contrived how to use halftones on rotary presses.

Labor. By the 1890s some of the larger urban newspapers employed more than one thousand people on their printing, editorial, and advertising staffs. Technological developments brought with them increased labor specialization and greater demands from workers. Beginning in 1881 the American Federation of Labor organized printers, pressmen, and engravers in unions that pressed for better wages, improved working conditions, and shorter hours. Between 1886 and 1901 the International Typographical Union split by specialty into four different unions reducing the danger of plantwide strikes. Also, in 1899 the American Newspaper publishers Association worked with the printers’ unions to establish arbitration procedures to reduce the likelihood of strikes.

Sources

W. Turner Berry and H. Edmund Poole, Annals of Printing (London: Blandford Press, 1966);

Sidney Kobre, The Yellow press and Gilded Age Journalism (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1964);

Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 7th edition, revised and expanded (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992).